Reading: Leviticus 19-20, Psalm 36
One of the great complaints made about reading the Bible is that it is long and difficult to understand. And to be fair, there are parts of this really long story that are pretty arcane. But lets give the Biblical authors some credit: they were able to write an applied legal code, with some narrative thrown in, in about 18000 words- the word count of Leviticus in Hebrew. How do we do by comparison? Well, just the United States tax code is over 4 million words, to say nothing of the rest of the laws. We should count ourselves fortunate that ancient Hebrew legalese was at least concise.
We continue now on the down slope of the book of Leviticus, following the crest at the Day of Atonement. Here we see God continue expressing the importance for the people of Israel to make a distinction between themselves and the people around them, between the common and the holy, the pure and the impure. Some of these distinctions make a great deal of sense to us: forbidding incestuous relationships, child sacrifice, sexual slavery, unjust legal proceedings, and dishonest social behavior. Some others are more difficult: sexual ethics foreign to our culture, not reaping everything you can from your field, but deliberately leaving some behind for the poor, dispensing with revenge and grudges, and special honor for the aged. And then there are some that make no sense to us at all: not sowing your fields with two kinds of grain, cross-breeding your cattle, or making clothes of two kinds of cloth.
I’ll make a couple of observations about some of the really oddball ones. On no tattoos or cutting for the dead: these were rampant religious practices in the ancient world in funeral practices, up to and including ritual suicide in some cultures. God is banning them to make a distinction between his people’s funeral practices and these. On mediums and necromancers or witches: these people claimed to be able to speak with the dead in the context of, you guessed it, the religions of the nations around Israel. God is banning them to make a distinction between his worship and that of the nations around them. While I do not know the specifics, I am willing to go out on a limb and guess that pretty much all the commands that seem like nonsense to us (mixed thread garments) fall into this category in some way. Everything is about the distinction between the people of God and the people of Canaan.
It is worthwhile once again to remind ourselves that the book of Leviticus was the applied code of behavior for the people of Israel’s covenant with God 3400 years ago in the wilderness of Sinai, and that there are bound to be things in it that are a little strange to us. To the time and culture differences, there is the matter of another covenant that comes later in the story. This adds up to a reminder that while we might learn a thing or two from what God says to his people, these are not rules for us. They are for a particular people in a particular time and a particular place. That being said, we can see some very important things that are said here that will loom very large as the story goes on.
First and foremost is the holiness of God, and the call from God for his people to be holy as he is holy. God is still working out his promise to Abraham to undo the human problem through these people, and it will not do for them to simple dissolve into the cultures around them. God makes it extremely clear that Israel is not to be like the nations around them.
Underneath this, God makes repeated reference to how the people of Israel are to treat other humans, and not just their own people. They are not to mistreat the poor or the foreigner, or the disabled- the lowest of social classes. Other humans may do such things, but God’s people are to be exceptional. This wraps up in the famous second commandment: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. It is tempting to make this the focus of the story here, but it isn’t. The people of Israel are to do this not because it is “right” in the abstract but because the Lord is their God.
The purity codes, ethical codes, atonement rituals- everything that this book has instructed the people of Israel to do- is wrapped around this point. Israel is to be what they are because God is holy, and they are to be holy as he is holy.